Nate, Jay,
I find Nate's message saying basically the thoughts I had about what I
thought would be my final response to the first 3+1 of Jay's message. One
of the most important themes of Marxist thought is that all theories have a
political existence, valence, and relationship; they reflect a pollitical
view--what is the politics of Jay's position. Another way to put this is:
for whom is this knowledge? Who does the knowledge (I am still
uncomfortable with the use of the word "truths" as Jay uses it) serve? In
other words, Jay, how do you position your analysis within the concrete
social systems in which it is produced? I find no real human subject of
this knowledge in the following description:
"The systems-that-know, the systems that do
semiosis, include human organisms both in the category sense and in the
part-whole sense. Human organisms are not subjects if they are taken in
isolation from the larger systems of which we are a part; any labor-based
theory of knowledge implies as much. The system in which knowing and
meaning occur as processes is a system larger than the organism, and a
system organized on and across many scales of organization. It is an
impossible question in general, and usually a difficult one in any concrete
case, to say which levels of organization, in what relationships to one
another, are the subjects of history. From DNA and cells, to organisms and
tools, to families, villages, social ecosystems, online communities and the
technologies that enable them ... and for each of these, just as for the
different Umwelts of different species, there are different truths."
It's all process, yes I guess this is a form of materialism. But for whom
and for what does it serve? What are the political consequences of you
delineating this in this way, sort of like Watt with his drawing and
diagrams, or are you, as I suspect simply "describing the way it is."
This morning I was writing the last part of a response to first 3+1
messages. I went out and came back to find 4 or 5 more, not as long as the
first 3+1 but a lot. I just can't seem to keep up with the volume. Now
it's late again, the massive heat wave in California (beginning of a long
hot summer that is the beginning of the long hot future, according to
scientists) has produced delightful 70 degree days here in the normally
foggy, cool northcoast summer. Thoughts turn elsewhere and I just don't
write that fast. Fortunately I think there are central points, like those
that exist in buildings, points that hold the whole edifice together and the
removal of which brings the reduces the entire structure to rubble. The
political position of this theorizing is one such point, the other is the
clearly objectivist notion of time that Jay employs to argue the complexity
of the multi-level system, a topic we discussed at length last November or
October.
In any event Nate, I'd like to say I'm really glad that you picked up on
the apolitical implications of Jay's position. One thing about dialectical
materialism, right or wrong it never denies its practical implications for
politics. You mention the WTO? In Capital Marx wrote that capitalism had
a world historical destiny to subsume all other modes of production, just in
the nature of its being to do this, like the scorpion on the proverbial
turtle's back. And just another of his many predictions to materialize in
the course of history. Lenin was among the first to identify the specific
historical forms of imperialism (mercantile, financial, etc.) with the
historical trajectory of class conflict in the industrialized nations of
Europe and America (an issue that seen chauvinistically raises an
anti-corporate capitalist furor among "anti-communist" american workers).
Andre Gundar Frank, Samir Amin and Immanuel Wallerstein among others who
have theorized the relationship between development in the center and
underdevelopment in the periphery (Wallerstein's terms), all all recognized
the importance of the Marxist analyses of the "capitalist world system" for
understanding the "world economic system". In Seattle, the historical
materialists, the reds, the communists, were just one of the thousand points
of light but then they were among the first to turn a light on this
particular phenomena now known as "globalization" and this was done with the
political intent of eliminating all relations of economic exploitation.
I'm unsure what is being illuminated with Jay's theoretical constructions or
why.
Paul H. Dillon
----- Original Message -----
From: Nate Schmolze <nate_schmolze@yahoo.com>
To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Friday, June 16, 2000 5:11 PM
Subject: Re: historicity, gender, and social theory
> Jay,
>
> Just read your message and while I think it is important academically, I
am
> wondering how it all fits in a political context. The commentators
contrast
> the WTO protesters to the 60's and point toward how they are a thousand
> points of light (unlike the 60's) . The governor of our state loves taking
> advantage of the different discourses to destroy any type of collective
> action. Welfare reform was a case in point when collective action was
> beginning to develop between some policy makers, parents, and early child
> educators he would through out carrots to one or another to dissolve any
> emerging collective action.
>
> So, when you say,
>
> " So it is not a good time for any long-established theory about social
> > systems, or any current theory for that matter, to expect to be more
than
> > one precursor to the radically transformed theories of later in this
> > century. It is however a very good time to be saying new things,
remaking
> > old concepts, and generally riding the rapids.">
>
> should not there be some hesitency or concern. What are these rapids
> politically speaking?
>
> Nate
>
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Jay Lemke <jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu>
> To: XMCA LISTGROUP <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Sent: Friday, June 16, 2000 2:36 PM
> Subject: historicity, gender, and social theory
>
>
> > One of the areas of convergence between dynamical systems theory and
> > (broadly marxist) historical materialism is the emphasis on historical
> > contingency. Unfortunately, without a theory of relevant timescales,
> > historicity in explanatory discourse can get embarassing.
> >
> > For one thing, you are obliged by reflexivity to account for the
specific
> > historical origins of your own discourse, and at least a guess at its
> > historically specific limitations. For another, your theory has to have
a
> > fairly finite time horizon; you can't theorize about matters that don't
> yet
> > exist, just as you can't theorize about matters that may exist but are
not
> > yet culturally visible.
> >
> > These issues are more tractable if you can define the timescales on
which
> > various sorts of changes in social practices and discourses, including
> your
> > own, are taking place, and how they are linked to one another.
> >
> > Historicity, even in the present, involves quite a bit -- way too much
in
> > fact. The present historical circumstances include EVERYTHING that is
> going
> > on in the world. If you accept the many-to-one view of how discourses,
or
> > representations, match up to material processes, then YOU can't know or
> > perceive a lot of what is going on, because you're only equipped with
some
> > discourses. If you are really wise (which most of us are not) you will
go
> > out and try to get hold of incommensurable discourses from people who
are
> > as differently socially positioned from yourself as possible. Then you
> may,
> > to the extent you can understand these discourses, be able to see more
of
> > present circumstances. But who should you talk to? their social distance
> > from you is defined by the parameters of your own discourse/theory. If
> it's
> > a class-centered theory, you go talk to the workers. It may not occur to
> > you to talk to your wife, or your ten-year old child, or a villager in
> India.
> >
> > It was very insightful of Marx and Engels to connect legal equality (and
> > workplace equality, and home equality, and financial equality, and
> > generally power equality) to the possibility of (ie. the changed
> historical
> > conditions necessary for) gaining better understanding of gender
> relations.
> > But all they could do, in their own historical circumstances, was to see
> > gender relations as an example of the same sort of relations they were
> > theorizing for class. A sort of prototype of class relations. What they
> > could see about gender relations in their capitalist society was how
> gender
> > relations in the nuclear family were useful to (used by) capitalism.
> >
> > None of that, of course, is at all like what gender theorists have to
say
> > about gender today. The ways in which gender relations are appropriated
to
> > the economic-productive order is taken to be secondary to bodily and
felt
> > experiencing of sexualities and human relationships; to the responses of
> > gendered subjects to dominant discourses and practices, and especially
to
> > dominant attitudes and values; to the unique products, in the form of
> lives
> > lived, feelings felt, connections made, of gendered lives other than
those
> > stereotypically sanctioned by masculine norms and values.
> >
> > What happens to the objective category of social class when we begin to
> > realize that gender is experienced differently across classes, and
across
> > age-groups and cultures? when we realize that there are not several
> systems
> > of social relations here, but ONE, with multiple, interacting
dimensions?
> > How do we have to reconceptualize social class to marry it to gender
> > theory; to make both (and other elements) parts of a more powerful
> > analysis? At the very least, for example, we have to wonder how social
> > class is experienced differently with differences in gender and
sexuality,
> > and how it feels to be economically oppressed and oppressed by virtue of
> > gender or 'race', indeed just how much it matters to the definition of
> > social class how you _experience_ the 'objective' conditions of your
> > economic relations (how you feel them as well as how you talk about
them).
> > Contemporary gender theory is on the forefront of theorizing without
> > factorizing. Class theory has a lot to learn from it.
> >
> > But these new discourses and analytical perspectives are themselves the
> > product of changed times, in part of exactly the differences in power
> > relationships from a century or more ago needed to allow SOME
contribution
> > from publicly silenced subjects to be heard. Once it's heard, all sorts
of
> > new possibilities open up for hybridizing it (a sort of useful halfway
> > house between replacement and incommensurability isolationism) with
views
> > inherited from earlier historical epochs. A lot depends on the relative
> > timescales of social change (in women's power) and theory change (when
> > class theorists decide to stop trying to assimilate the new paradigms to
> > the old ones and try doing the reverse, or something still more
> thoughtful).
> >
> > The timescale of global technological change has lately proved shorter
> than
> > that for global cultural change, at least insofar as the dominant old
> > euro-patriarchal culture succeeded in its greed in getting its
> economically
> > productive and global-scale communications technologies distributed
around
> > the world before it succeeded in homogenizing the world's cultures in
its
> > image. That means that their relative power is increasing rapidly and
our
> > coupling to their cultures is also, so that various sorts of
> > 'post-colonial' discourses are now producing and will continue to
produce
> > radically new social analyses.
> >
> > I'd be willing to bet on two more rapidly rising sources:
transformations
> > of gender theory coming from newly empowered voices of formerly taboo
> > sexualities (from gay and lesbian, to TV/TG, to intersexual, to S&M, to
> > everything in all combinations and mixed together in the lives of many
of
> > the same people), and totally new perspectives coming from younger age
> > cohorts (at least the 13-20s and the 6-13s, maybe younger still on a
> longer
> > time horizon) and perhaps older age groups as well ... as these two
> > increase in relative power and challenge the privilege sustaining myths
of
> > vanilla sexuality and 'adult' superiority.
> >
> > So it is not a good time for any long-established theory about social
> > systems, or any current theory for that matter, to expect to be more
than
> > one precursor to the radically transformed theories of later in this
> > century. It is however a very good time to be saying new things,
remaking
> > old concepts, and generally riding the rapids.
> >
> > JAY.
> >
> > ---------------------------
> > JAY L. LEMKE
> > PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
> > CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
> > JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
> > <http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
> > ---------------------------
>
>
>
>
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